In today’s digital economy, practical business knowledge is more than powerful. It is essential for survival and elementary for thriving! And it’s no different when you’re looking for a social media marketing strategy for 2018.

Can you afford to spend weeks and months trying to figure out the “secret” to Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter success all by yourself?

I don’t think so either…

That’s why I propose you meet with and learn from the experts instead. And then, possibly steal their best social media marketing strategy for 2018.

If you want to know what works in digital media for 2018 (and beyond) then it is essential you learn from the bloggers who eat, live and breathe social media marketing. You may have heard about some of them already.

I had the pleasure to interview these famous digital marketing bloggers, and this article you’re reading now includes their best “secret recipes” on the best social media strategy, platforms and tools out there.

Bonus info: Did you know that you can speed up your WordPress by 50-80% with little effort? Click here for some simple fixes you can do today.

They all had to answer the same social media marketing question:

What is your most powerful social media marketing strategy, and how do you connect your WordPress blog with it?

Enjoy the insights, feel free to connect with these bloggers, and also share the post with your friends and co-workers. Thanks!

Zac Johnson

My most powerful social media marketing strategy has been through the creation of my podcast, Rise of the Entrepreneur. With almost 100 episodes in the books, it’s great to see how the show has grown and reached new audiences over time.

You can see 15 of my favorite episodes here. (keep in mind, when associating yourself with other experts and brands, it can also bring new audiences and exposure back to yourself as well)

As a social media play, it works in a few different ways. The first is that each episode is available through iTunes and also through my blog.

When a new episode goes live, it will be sent out to all of my social media outlets, while also being published on the blog for anyone to listen to. Again, two different forms of content working for me here — both audio and text (blog post).

In addition to myself promoting the show, the guest on each episode will usually put out their own promotion as well. If you have the right tools in place, you can use a tool like MeetEdgar to plug in all of your blog posts (or whatever content) and have them scheduled out for repeated social sharing over time.

When doing this, you should also include the social account of the person you are interviewing. This would then increase the likelihood of getting more social shares and retweets even weeks or months after your initial content/podcast goes live.

Matthew Barby

I wrote a huge case study that outlines a whole social media strategy that I used to drive huge growth through to my WordPress website.

You can check that out but here is some advice that I’d give:

Try to focus on the growth of your social media following by tapping into channels outside of the social networks itself.

Think about how you can build a mechanism into your website to encourage engagement within your social media accounts – for example, offering exclusive content to users that share your content on social media.

Another way could be to utilise your email subscriber list to drive engagement within social.

Here’s how else I tie social deeper into my WordPress sites… by using my social footprint WordPress plugin that helps me pull through social virality metrics on my content.

Neil Patel

The most powerful social media strategy I’ve seen is connecting with people who share blog posts within your space. For example, I use Twitter’s search to see who shares competing articles, I then network with those individuals and ask them to share my content.

A lot of people will ignore your email, but at least 10% will share your content. It’s an easy way to gain traction to your blog.

Adam Connell

Helps entrepreneurs reach more people online. Founder of BloggingWizard, and a Firefly and Chinese takeaways fanBloggingWizard.com@Twitter

This may sound counter intuitive at first, but stick with me here.

You might setup a website, or have someone set one up for you. And immediately try to encourage people to check out your tweets, like your Facebook page and check out your photo’s on Instagram.

Links to social profiles are likely in very prominent places with the occasional social widget – maybe displaying tweets etc.

And while this may result in growing your following, chances are that some people will end up on Facebook and instead of checking out your page – they’ll find themselves watching cat videos.

Then there is the fact that you’re building on rented land. When Facebook changed its algorithm the first time some bloggers lost 90% of their traffic overnight. It may sound like I’m saying social is a waste of time. But that’s far from the truth.

What I am saying is this:

Relying on 1-2 different platforms to grow our businesses, we need to take a different approach that reduces potential risk.

So what can you do instead?

Build your email list first, then use your email list to build the following on your priority social networks. Still make your social profiles available, but put the priority on building an email list.Craft a strong offer that compels people to sign up to your list.

Then encourage subscribers to connect with you on social networks from your confirmation page and at several points within an auto responder sequence.

Afterwards you’ll have:

A larger email list that is yours – no news feed algo change can take it away.

The ability to drive more traffic back to your content (if that’s your thing) – most email broadcasts will drive more clicks.

A more engaged social following – you’ll likely not get as many followers but those you do get will be far more engaged, and that’s what matters right?!

Technical setup with WordPress:

First you need an email provider such as MailChimp or ActiveCampaign.

Each of these tools provides opt-in forms but they are very basic in terms of functionality and don’t look very good.

You can use a tool like Thrive Leads or SumoMe to display opt-in forms on your WordPress website. SumoMe can work with any HTML site if you don’t use WordPress. I’ve covered some other options in this post on list building plugins.

Then you need to setup a unique confirmation page that subscribers go to after confirming their subscription.

If you have a lead magnet, this is a good place to put it, but you should also display calls to action for people to connect with you on your main social profiles.

Then you can do a similar thing within your auto responder sequence. All it takes is to ask your subscribers to connect with you, provide links to your social profiles and explain the core benefits they’ll get from connecting.

Andrea Loubier

For social media you should create different content for each channel. Linked in followers will have different needs and interests than your Facebook or Twitter fans and followers.

Promoting your blog content via social media.

You can promote the same content using different snippets. Those snippets are then targeted to different audience and can be shared on different social media channels and groups.

We go for the direct ask on the Mailbird blog, a lot of times we’ll ask people to share their thoughts in the comments of our blog then share it using the Facebook button.

Otherwise we also have blog subscribers so anytime we publish a new post they are notified.

With Social media though, one of our best hacks to build engagement on all social channels was to host a Sweepstakes event that encourages people to connect and follow us on all social channels that Mailbird is on which include LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more.

Once they connect, we do a quick follow up with them to ask them how it’s going with using Mailbird to start the convo.

We like to also share a lot of entertaining or inspirational images related to email/productivity tend to get picked up a lot when it comes to sharing. We connect with the relevant groups within these channels depending on the content angle we have at that time.

Andrew James

We at Brand Builders are using FB as our primary social traffic source.

First and foremost, you need to have a FB retargeting pixel installed on your website (site-wide). This will enable you to segment your audience by the pages they visited which will help you determine if they converted or not.

Let’s say you’re selling “Product A” which has a value of $199.

You can go ahead and create a lead magnet that relates to your target audience (helps them solve a specific problem) and then set up a landing page with a clear CTA.

Create a “thank you” page where your visitor will be able to download/see your lead magnet.

Install the conversion pixel on your “thank you” page.

Next, you can go ahead and create a splinter of your main product.

If you’re selling an online SEO course; you can splinter it by detaching one module of your course and present it as a standalone offer, let’s say “How To Write Headlines That Convert”

Once you have your splinter offer ready, price it anywhere between $7-$29 (for this example, we’ll price it at $9).

Finally, set up a landing + “thank you” page for your core offer – Product A and make sure you install the conversion pixel on the “thank you” page.

Now, this is where the fun begins. Since you have a retargeting pixel installed on your site, you can easily monitor and target people who visited (or haven’t visited) specific pages (thank you pages) and serve them with your ads.

To clarify – If a person who landed on your page, blog post, etc. didn’t see your Lead Magnet’s thank you page, it means that they are interested in your broad topic, but maybe they haven’t noticed your lead magnet, they have a pop-up blocker installed, or something similar.

You can go ahead and set up a Facebook ad, targeting these specific visitors (we have the retargeting pixel installed, remember?).

We will create a custom audience and include all the people who visited your blog/site and exclude the people who visited your Lead Magnet’s thank you page. This way, you will serve your ads ONLY to those visitors who still haven’t converted into leads.

Next step is to make sure that we present your Tripwire offer ONLY to the people that converted on your Lead Magnet’s landing page. You can either send them an email with the TW link or automatically redirect them to your TW offer once they sign up for your Lead Magnet – totally up to you.

From our experience – 50% of your Lead Magnet landing page visitors will convert into leads and around 10% of those leads will convert to customers by purchasing your Tripwire offer.

Once that’s been done, you can go ahead and set up your second custom audience.

In this one we’ll ONLY target people who visited your Lead Magnet’s thank you page (leads) and exclude people who visited your tripwire’s thank you page (customers).

You should set up an ad asking them to come back to your TW sales page (be creative) and do your best to convert them to customers.

The last step is identical. You create a custom audience including the customers who visited your Tripwire’s thank you page and exclude people who visited your Product A’s thank you page. Serve them with ads and try to persuade them to buy your core offer.

This is how the real sales funnel boosted with social media strategy looks like. You will continually serve your ads to the targeted people and move them throughout your funnel till they reach your core offer’s thank you page = $.

Andy Crestodina

Social media is really just facilitated word of mouth. The goal is to reduce all the friction between the content and the act of sharing. Adding social sharing buttons to your content is the key to trigger sharing. Everyone knows this. Every blog does this.

How do many sites get it wrong?

It’s easy to add sharing buttons with WordPress plugins. Within a few clicks, these candy-colored icons will appear right there in your blog. But social media integration isn’t that easy. These social sharing tools may be promoting themselves while your readers are sharing their content.

See how the button adds the brand of the plugin maker into the tweet? That doesn’t help you or your readers. That’s facilitating word of mouth for them!

If you don’t trust your plugins, or you want more exact control, you can create custom social sharing buttons. You need to do it separately for each social network. Here’s where you can find the instructions:

It is a shame more people aren’t using Pinterest more because to me, it is one of the most under-appreciated social media platforms with the greatest traffic potential.

Why?

Because when you add something on any other social media network, it can last for minutes or days at best. Pinterest however, is like good SEO. The traffic just keeps on coming. And in many cases, if the pins are popular, your traffic will grow too!

So even if you think you don’t have a chance on Pinterest, take a look and see if anyone is sharing content in your niche before you dismiss it as an option.

Then get busy creating awesome images using Canva, making sure you add relevant text to the image. Once the post images are ready, you can share them on yours, and group boards.

Brian Jackson

My post powerful social media marketing strategy right now is taking advantage of newer tools on the block, like SmarterQueue, Narrow, and Content Marketer. These help me be more productive so I can spend more time producing content.

SmarterQueue allows me to queue up all of my evergreen content and let it continue to cycle to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

This allows more eyeballs on all my content than ever before.

Narrow is an amazing tool to grow your Twitter following within a specific niche. I am amazed by the rapid growth and quality of followers I am getting.

This tool has sparked up amazing conversations which have turned into leads and customers.

Whenever I write roundup posts, Content Marketer allows me to reach out to everyone involved with only a few clicks, and ask for a shares on social.

This has skyrocketed my Twitter engagement and saved me tons of time.

All of these strategies above involve almost no effort once setup. They have dramatically increased social media referral traffic to my blogs.

Daniel Thompson

The social platform that I’m currently making the most use of is Instagram. What I love about it is they’ve deliberately tried to grind down automation.

Two projects I’m currently working on are a men’s fashion site and an ecommerce store. I have ~30k Instagram followers between the two of them and they grow every single day.

They also drive 20-30 visitors per day back to my website with no promotion outside of the one link Instagram gives you. These accounts are only four months old.

So – the original question how do I connect it to our WordPress blog. Currently it’s a one way street. Traffic flows from Instagram to our websites. We’re in the process of putting offers together for both sites to start driving traffic to add to our email lists.

I’m currently working on creating original images for our men’s fashion blog posts. I’ll be adding call to actions below those images to improve the number of followers on IG.

I think the biggest misconception is you need to be in the perfect industry to build an IG account. Foundr is a great example of a non-traditional IG niche that is crushing it.

If you’re selling biodegradable poop bags, you got dogs. If you’re selling car parts you have classic cars. Most consumer products lend themselves to IG in one way or another.

We make it easy to share our content from our website with the click of a button but we also make sure to share it all ourselves regularly. We don’t just share once.

Having a strategy that encompasses the full spectrum of social channels allows you to target different consumers on different platforms.

We find that each social media platform drives traffic to our blog with Pinterest being the stickiest traffic. The reason we feel that social media drives so much traffic to our blog is because we are social on social media.

We don’t use it as a loud speaker, we talk to our followers. When we share something, they tend to read it because they feel that they know us. Numbers are important, but it’s having a relationship with audience that really matters.

We make sure to remain consistent and have a constant presence on social media. We have a team of people who help us publish our content on social media while we remain the true voice and only people that our followers talk to.

And then informing the people who are featured in them, leading to them sharing it on social media.

Published in May, this sent us over 7500 visits last year and received hundreds of shares. It also accounted for 21 trial sign ups and dozens more email subscribers.

We felt it could be very successful because it involved a ton of influencers, and we executed an outreach campaign around the content after it was published to get it in front of everyone who was mentioned.

It ended up ranking in Google and getting featured on several websites, that helped boost its authority too.

The end to end process was effectively:

Coming up with a list of target keywords that were relevant to our product and also for which we felt we could gain traction, in this case Traffic Generation Case Studies

Producing epic content featuring over 100 influencers

Promoting that content to those influencers

Linking to that content in important guest poss that we wrote afterwards, for example, com/traffic-hack/

Optimizing it for sign ups (we’re using Sumo Me’s Welcome Mat on that page)

This strategy has been very effective for us and we’ve replicated it in other articles, although this was the most popular.

These posts almost always get hundreds of shares and help us build our social media following.

Dom Wells

My most successful social media strategy is not about using it to generate traffic, but more about networking. In some niches, the best way to get traction is to befriend the other influencers in your industry.

Twitter and FB groups are a great way to do this. Of course, it depends on your niche and where the influencers hang out.

By spending most of 2014 and 2015 networking and making myself known in the niche, I was able to make referral traffic my number 1 converting source of traffic, and now people reach out to me all the time.

I guess I managed to elevate myself to influencer level. Without social media, this wouldn’t be possible as easily.

Gael Breton

To be frank, the most basic one for me that a lot of people ignore is make sure you actually have social buttons on all your content pages. If possible buttons that scroll down with the user so it is on the screen at all time.

And most importantly, buttons that are visible on all devices as a TON of traffic is mobile these days.

Here is our breakdown on one of our sites

Clearly, mobile share optimisation is super important and many B2C sites traffic split will look more and more like this in 2018.

Luckily, SumoMe allows you to do all of this really easily. Out of all the paid social plugins I have tried. SumoMe beats them all in every aspect and it is free.

While playing with the plugin I have noticed the raise of a social network a lot of people ignore: email.

Here is the breakdown of our shares per network (thanks to SumoMe’s analytics)

Grey = email shares. This is the 2nd or 3rd most popular way of sharing content depending on the days. Outdoing Twitter every single day.

Then we started adding buttons on our images as we scaled up our Pinterest activity and noticed that most Pinterest shares happened that way so if you use the network, turn the image sharer on.

Mixing these share buttons together with reposting other people’s infographics that were related to the article (and giving them attribution) boosted our social traffic a lot pretty much on autopilot.

If you want to get the most of these shares, make sure your SCHEMA social data and use the Coschedule headline analyzer to write socially enticing headlines to boost your CTR.

That’s it, just do these simple things and you should get more out of your WordPress site when it comes to social media almost all on autopilot!

Gerald Weber

My most powerful social media marketing strategy (especially for a newer website, blog or business) is using the platform Viral Content Buzz to promote blog posts with Viral appeal. (Full disclosure: I am co-founder of Viral Content Buzz).

That being said it really works. In fact it work very well if your content is in a popular niche and has viral appeal.

For example my wife and I started a new business in August 2013 and promoted the blog using only the VCB platform.

The reason it’s so effective is that it’s a relatively simple way for a marketer/blogger who doesn’t have a large following to generate REAL social media shares from REAL people and REAL social media accounts.

No puppet accounts and no fake shares. The way I automate this process is by adding the RSS feed of our blog. Once it’s approved by VCB moderators each post will then automatically submit for sharing.

Adam Steele

Our strategy really starts internally – we document everything we do, as much of our process as possible. We be sure to share our experiences primarily with the tools we use (we’re big on Trello, for example).

They often then pick up our story and share as if it were a case study of their product’s use. We get a link, some eyeballs and everyone wins.

Of course, this connects with the blog because our medium to share our stories is currently our blog. But keeping it honest and really having it document our day to day mundane is great for a case study, and the platforms are naturally interested.

Istiak Rayhan

Social Media makes it easier for someone to connect with my blog through a platform they’re already using. It helps me to reach my target audience and connect like-minded people.

The most powerful social media marketing strategy for me is retargeting, also known as remarketing.

A lot of people visit my blog every day, but very few people follow me on social media and share my contents. retargeting helps me to connect with those visitors and increase my social media following as well as social shares.

I boost my most popular posts to my blog audience. It works great because those are the people who are already interested in my blog.

Along with retargeting, I make sure that people find it easier to share my contents and follow me on social media.

Here are few WordPress plugins that I am using to grow my blog and encourage sharing.

Tracking Code Manager – It helps me to manage all tracking codes and conversion pixels from one single page. I can easily manage Facebook Custom Audience & Facebook retargeting by using this plugin.

Monarch – It’s a social sharing plugin that makes social sharing insanely easy. You can add sharing buttons in different ways by using the plugin. You can also use it to add social media follow buttons.

Jetpack – Jetpack is actually a bundle of plugins. It has tons of features. One of the features allows me to share my blog post to social sharing channel automatically. It’s compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path, and Google+.

Click to Tweet – I am using this plugin on my favorite posts to add “Click To Tweet” box. It works great for me.

OnePress Social Locker – This plugin really helps me to increase my social sharing. The idea is, hiding a part of a post behind a set of social buttons and ask visitors to share my content to see the hiding part. I mainly use this trick on long posts.

Devesh Sharma

21 year old blogger, Internet marketer, WordPress fanatic, and founder of WPKube.com@Twitter

It would be sharing same posts at different times or recycling old posts. It can easily be done using via Revive Old Posts or MeetEdgar.

Sharing old posts helps you get more traffic and followers, an experiment done by Tom Tunguz revealed that each tweet has the potential to get around 75% as many tweets as of the previous number of retweets.

Jacob Cass

To maximize the sharability of my posts, I schedule them at the times that are optimized for my readers. With the use of Google Analytics you can see when and where your traffic comes from, as well as looking at your email newsletter database.

I then schedule posts for when they’re most likely online, with the use of WordPress & Buffer.

As an example, I’ll schedule a post to post on my blog at 9am, and then by 10am it is imported into AWeber (my email provider), I then schedule the email newsletter to send out around 1pm when most of my audience around the world are online.

I also schedule posts to be shared on my social media platforms with Buffer, ensuring images are included to maximize clicks.

Kevin Indig

One thing that I see forgotten and underestimated time over time again is … Facebook Groups! They are a very powerful traffic source, if you manage to approach them right.

See those spikes in overall traffic on the screenshot? Those come from promoting a new blog post in Facebook Groups!

But how do you do it right? Here is what you have to consider:

1. Use Facebook’s search function to find suitable groups for the topic of your blog or article you want to share. The more specific the group, the better. For example: while “Fitness” is very broad as a topic, “Fat loss” would be more specific and more suitable for a blog post about losing fat.

2. The second variable you’d want to take into account is group size. The perfect group for your purpose is the best combination of specificity and size.

3. In the next step you’d want to join 5-10 groups. You cannot post as a Fan Page in a group, so you’ll have to use a private profile. This means that this profile suddenly becomes the face of the blog.

It’s very important how trustworthy that profile looks, so find a good looking profile picture and interact in a nice way with people commenting on the shared post.

Imagine you walk past a bar and a sketchy looking guy asks you to come inside in a rough tone – would you go? It’s the same on social media! Also be aware that many big groups are well moderated, so read the group rules carefully and stick to them.

*** Share your blog article in 3-5 groups at a time. You’d want to do some testing about the best time to post in the group. Start trying out to share either around lunch (12-1PM) or after work (6-9PM), as stated in this infographic.

Also keep in mind to not flood groups with your postings, or users will get annoyed. I made good experiences with sharing once week in a group, but it also depends on the group itself. Engaging in the group outside of sharing your own material, you can build even more trustworthiness!

When you share, it’s utmost important to write a quick description of the blog article that excites users to click. The more it’s individualized it is towards the group, the better. Therefore you can either include the group name in the description or connect to the group’s topic.

Why are Facebook groups so powerful? Not only do you speak to an audience that’s already potentially interested in your topic, but you can also leverage the Facebook community to convert it into your own. Your blog can become a recurring reference in the group and eventually more and more group members will visit your site regularly.

And here we are already at the second benefit: you build an increasing base of returning visitors and loyal readers. Two sub-benefits that come with that: you can convert them to e-mail subscribers, which is an even more powerful way to interact with them and have them embrace your brand.

And you improve the way your brand is perceived in organic search results: more people will click on your result, if they recognize your brand. This in return has a positive impact on your SEO performance!

The third benefit of leveraging Facebook Groups in your social media strategy is interaction with the group members. They’ll let you know not only what they might be missing from your article, but also what questions they have about the topic and what other topics they are interested in.

You should answer these questions in your article. Don’t hesitate to edit it after you published. Refine it over time! Comments can also provide inspiration for future articles, which you can then again share in the group that it was discussed in and refer to the people you talked to about it. This is how you build a strong user base!

We’ve found that people who are familiar with your brand are 3x more likely to engage with your promoted social media ads and 2x more likely to convert to a lead or sale when they click over to your site.

Luke Kling

1) Finding content that I know my audience will enjoy and want to engage with. Engagement is key with social media (especially Facebook Pages).

The more engagement you get, the more engagement you will get in the future. Provide value consistently over time.

2) Posting consistently is the easiest way to improve your overall engagement. If you post randomly throughout the month then you are less likely for your content to be seen.

I have Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts that I have posted on 3 times a day every single day for the past 3+ years. The engagement I get on my content is phenomenal because I provide consistent value to my audience.

This leads to better engagement on posts less…engaging (blog posts or sponsored posts).

3) I also mix my content types across all channels. I’ll post 2 images (yielding high engagement) and 1 blog post link one day. The next day I’ll post 1 YouTube video and 2 images.

Keep your content fresh and the user guessing what you’re going to give them next. I schedule all my content and keep it fresh across all my channels using FPTraffic.com.

FPTraffic also allows me to automatically queue up new blog posts from my WordPress blogs and mix them with the rest of my content. This helps drastically increase my overall engagement.

I reach over 5,000,000 people a week using my social media strategy so I know it works. It just takes time, effort, and the right tools. Good luck!

Marcus Taylor

One of the best strategies I’ve come across is using in-article polls, tools or surveys to better understand the traffic, and then using the insights from those surveys to fine tune the content – making it more relevant and by extension more shareable.

Unfortunately I cannot control how many of my page likes Facebook shows my posts to. So I focus on publishing quality content…

that’s interesting to my audience

that teaches people something new

that offers a new perspective on the topic

that entertains

and that’s better and easier to understand than the content already available on the subject.

I have full details on this content creation process here. That’s the best way for me to reach more people as I’m providing enough value so that people will want to share and spread the word about it in social media.

McKinzie Brocail

It can be a unique and interesting conundrum working for STDcheck.com, a nation-wide STD testing provider, in the social media realm.

As to be expected, it is not a simple task to get people to engage with a brand that offers STD testing, something very private, on extremely public social media.

We often have to provoke people on social media to read and share our blog content because sexually transmitted diseases are usually something people want to keep quiet about.

Like most companies, we share our blog posts across our social media platforms, and have sharing tools enabled on our WordPress blog that make it easy for visitors to do so as well.

Both of these outlets can be information dispensers, but blogs are primarily about dispensing info, while social media is more about engaging and interacting with the public.

We try to make the transition from one communication platform to the other fluid by sharing content that is fun, interesting, compelling, entertaining or clever.

Connecting both our blog and social media is incredibly significant for STDcheck. Not only does it give us relevant and interesting content and copy to share with our followers, but it brings an audience to our blog that likely wouldn’t have found it or sought it out on their own.

In fact, in the past, blog posts that were never shared across our social media accounts got very little traffic on their own.

After sharing them across the platforms we use, we very quickly began seeing dramatic increases (of up to 100 times more traffic in some instances!) in their views from individuals clicking and then sharing the posts.

We make transitioning seamless in that we don’t just copy-paste the link of an article on Facebook and post the auto-populated text – we tailor posts to be more captivating and enticing to our social media audience to get individuals to spread them around to their friends and followers… much like the STDs we reference in our blogs.

Not all things should be automated, but you should be setting up systems and looking for opportunities to automate portions of your social media strategy to free up your valuable time.

For example – a cliche piece of social media advice is to “post your new content to all your networks.” That might be useful for some people. But even if it is – you should not necessarily be physically posting to all your networks.

Even if that task takes “only 10 minutes” – that’s 10 minutes less that you have to do things that only you can do – write a personal email, respond to DMs, outline new content, dive into your analytics, etc.

Those are the things that will really drive long-term sustainable growth for your website. And usually machines can do tedious tasks better than you can if you take the time to set it up right.

If you’re on WordPress, you have the foundation in place to make quality automation happen. There’s a couple of secret automation weapons with WordPress.

First, it automatically generates quality RSS feeds not only for your website, but also for categories, tags and custom taxonomies. This means that you have content that is structured and machine readable.

Second, WordPress integrates well with automation tools like IFTTT and Zapier in addition to other services. And even if it doesn’t – those quality RSS feeds will.

Look at your social media workflow. Look at tasks that are effective. Look at tasks that only you can do – and what tasks are simply tedious. Browse through existing IFTTT recipes and Zapier zaps.

See if someone has already created something you can use.

If not, break down your process and create your own. For example, instead of “remembering to Pin” all your photo posts, create an IFTTT that pulls from a Photos tag RSS feed.

Tell it to automatically post to Pinterest using your title and a template description. There’s a lot that depends on your site, your content, your audience and your imagination. But using WordPress gives you the foundation to put some automation in place.

Nick Loper

Over the last 60 days, my Pinterest traffic is up over 2000%. (To be fair, it helps to divide by a very small number, but it goes to show I knew nothing about Pinterest a couple months ago.)

The basic strategy – and credit where credit is due, everything I know today is from Rosemarie Groner at The Busy Budgeter – is to pin your best content to relevant group boards.

I had fewer than 100 Pinterest followers when I started, but joining these group boards exploded my nominal “reach” to over 80,000 people within a couple weeks.

The big advantage to Pinterest is that it’s a unique social platform; it’s the only one where people are actively searching for helpful or cool blog articles. Everywhere else it’s to be entertained or to catch up with friends.

If your content appeals to women, this is a great way to get exposure and drive traffic, and the cool thing is that it now runs on autopilot thanks to a super-affordable tool called Board Booster (free trial, then $5/mo).

Identify your best posts, create vertical images for them (1000×1500), request to join a handful of relevant group boards, and go to town.

Image quotes will get you likes, comments, shares and clicks. Blog posts won’t. On Facebook, nobody cares about your blog posts. But they are ten times more likely to like, comment on, share, or even click an image quote.

Added to this I’ve been forging relationships with other Facebook Page owners and sharing each other’s image quotes and it all means more and more likes.

What does all this mean? Traffic!

Even though Facebook doesn’t show the blog posts half as much as it shows the image quotes, if you have crazy high numbers of Like and, more importantly, engagement on your Page, you WILL get traffic.

Sharon Gourlay

My most powerful social media marketing strategy is using Pinterest to advertise my blog posts. I find it only takes about 5 minutes to make a compelling pin that gets people pinning and clicking through to my posts.

I do this in two ways – by having a great pinnable image in my blog post along with a WordPress plugin to make it easy for people to pin the image straight to Pinterest.

I also pin the image around myself in Pinterest to popular group boards where they are likely to get repinned.

The best part about Pinterest for me is that it’s about ten minutes work up front and it can deliver hits for years to come. No other social media channel gives me anywhere near the same amount of reward for such little effort.

Also, when you share fellow bloggers’ content with genuine acknowledgement, many of them return the favor by sharing your content too. So it’s a win-win for both.

The key to success at social media is to get involved in genuine interactions with others. Engagement, regardless of its purpose, will only be fruitful once it is genuine and done with care and acknowledgement for the others.

Thomas Smale

Boosting posts on Facebook to improve the engagement. This is especially powerful if you retarget your website audience. These people recently visited your site so are most likely to want to share your content on Facebook.

This has worked best for us using blog posts – WordPress makes this especially easy and everyone (even small businesses) should blog regularly and consider small paid campaigns on Facebook to improve their reach.

Tim Bourquin

When most people talk about using social media to get traffic, they are talking about trying to get free traffic by building a following on Twitter or Facebook and then linking from those services to their blog and hoping the followers will click the link.

Early on in my blogging days I realized that just wasn’t sustainable. Just as Facebook changed the rules and began showing posts to less of the people who had “liked” your page, every social media network realizes that in order to make money they need people to advertise.

They can’t sustain their own business by doing nothing but allowing people to send traffic to their websites for free.

The good news is that advertising on Facebook is incredibly effective and doesn’t have to be expensive if you target your ads properly.

Two years ago I decided that any traffic I received for free from the social networks would be “icing on the cake” and that most of the traffic I get would be paid traffic.

I simply needed a way to show a good return on the investment by either showing ads on my own site or selling a paid product via an email autoresponder funnel.

These days, my social media marketing strategy is centered on Facebook ads. Sure, I’m happy when my blog’s twitter feed gets “retweets” and clicks, or when my blog’s Facebook page gets likes and shares of the posts, but I don’t count on that.

Treating your blog like a business means being willing to pay to get in front of prospective customers.

So, here is what I do on both the free and paid side to get traffic from Facebook over to my blog, where I can then encourage the visitor to sign up for my email newsletter.

But first, the most important thing to do is put your Facebook marketing pixel on every page of your blog. That way everyone who visits your blog can be re-targeted with ads when they return to Facebook.

EVERYTHING I do is designed to grow my email newsletter because once I have them on my list, my only cost to reach them is my monthly fee for my GetResponse account.

For free traffic:

Every blog post is put on the blog’s Facebook page as a post. Any clicks I get from those posts are terrific, but don’t matter in the grand scheme of my business.

Paid traffic:

Every Facebook post (of a blog post) is boosted with a $5 spend. Without this, you’ll likely reach a few hundred people at best. Spending just $5 to boost a post turns that number into a few thousand reached.

Once someone returns to Facebook, I re-target them (because they have now been “pixeled” when they hit my blog post page) with an ad that sends them to my email newsletter signup landing page.

If they click on a Facebook ad and go to that landing page but do NOT sign up, I re-target them with a different ad that again encourages them to sign up for my newsletter.

Bottom line: If you are just starting out, simply spend $5 to boost each Facebook post and you can begin to build that all-important Custom Audience of people who have visited your blog posts.

You can then scale that up to do regular Facebook ads that encourage people to join your email list.

These days I spend about $1,000 a week on Facebook ads – a lot of money but still peanuts compared to what some of the successful individual website owners spend.

But it ensures a steady growth of my email newsletter and because I have an autoresponder series that guides the visitor to becoming a paying customer of my products, I make money on that spend.

My goal is to spend $1,000 on Facebook ads and make $2,000 back on that spend for a 100% return on the investment.

If you are only thinking of social media as a way to get free traffic, stop. Anything you get for free is “gravy.” Treat your blog as a business and that means paying to get in front of your prospective customers.

Venchito Tampon

When others are trying to use Facebook Ads with no strategy in place, there are a few strategic methods that work for our content marketing campaigns at SharpRocket. We’ve invested a few bucks (less than $10. 47PHP = 1 USD) to promote our content assets to targeted audience.

While it’s definitely easy to custom ads to specific audience who might have interests to take an action for you – share, like or post clicks, there is always a near-guarantee to get ROI from Facebook retargeting efforts.

Peter Nilsson

There are tons of different social media marketing strategies, but which ones are most effective for your niche or brand? It’s not the easiest task to find out.

My recommendation is to try different strategies and examine which are most beneficial for your website.

WordPress and social media have certainly merged together and the vast majority who use WordPress as a publishing platform and CMS extensively utilize social media to obtain more traffic, building relationships and generate more sales.

I often use social media advertising in order to increase traffic to my websites. More traffic normally leads to more sales plus new both business and personal relationships.

It doesn’t need to be more complicated (theoretical). In practice somewhat more difficult but I want to explain my most powerful social media marketing strategy, (actually two) and I tried my way for sure with a variety of diverse results.

1. Facebook. Not that I would say Facebook is the best option in any way. Not at all, but my adverts on Facebook has really surpassed expectations.

Not at first, but it comes to fine-tune and target the right people, based on interest, age, location etc., making your ads more relevant to the audience you targeting. Reaching the right group gives you more value and results for the money you spent.

2. Giveaways. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Hosting giveaways on your website can really supercharge the traffic to your website. Visitors sharing a giveaway on social media to followers, friends, and acquaintances to win prizes.

Which in turn visit your website and sharing the giveaway. The procedure is repeated again and again, and everything this for advertising cost of zero, nada, nothing. I just love it.